following the signs to things unseen

I am now 7 months into fatherhood. Life is strange that way…you spend your life thinking there is a certain order to the world and that things only happen in that order, and whaam…the mango smoothy(cause i like them) hits the fan and you have a family with a new member on the way in a town you never thought you’d be in, with a future that…well…it seems like nobody is going to turn the fan off for a long time. Certainly there is a bit if fecal matter in the mango smoothy…cause really the best mango smoothy’s come from places where mangos grow outside the door like developing countries where the paranoia of shit isn’t the same as it is here. But, who thinks about the shit when there is all that mangoey goodness…with the added benefit of beefing up your immune system. Make sense? Good.

On the other hand, there is shit in the world…and it makes it hard to be excited about bringing another vulnerable soul into it, but that story is an old one. What father or mother hasn’t had a moment of hesitation to bring another person into the world knowing they eventually have to make the kinds of choices that make humans human or less than. I don’t wish on anyone the choice, subconcious or not, to be selfish or selfless; kind or rude; loving or hateful; happy or sad. I honestly have a hard time trusting anyone to make those choices in this world, even my own offspring. I am, hopefully, relentlessly teaching my son to make good choices in life…and apart from me I believe he is going to be a powerful influence of good in the world(cause of his mom’s amazing and interesting parenting). But seeing the society of hate, violence, greed and idolatry that he has to navigate I wouldn’t hope that the majority would be so fortunate as to have the back bone necessary to “make it.” And seeing his goodness, which is a force in itself, makes me want to declare war on all those who seek to twist and deceive. I can’t end this little strange post here so I’ll end with a nice story of Orion’s goodness.

I think Orion is as excited about being a big brother as I am about being the father of a new human. The other night he asked if he could look at the three or four baby outfits my mother bought as soon as she heard the news. He laid them all out like a nesting mother, carefully pressing out the wrinkles with his hands. After a while he thoughtfully folded them back up. And as he folded the last one he began sobbing. He sobs when he gets so excited that he doesn’t know what emotion to feel. It was a beautiful thing to see and it reminded me of how profound this experience is.

well we finally finished the deathstar. it took about 2 months less than i thought and about 28 days longer than orion thought. it was great to see the dedication he put into it. now we just need to harness the power of his work on the deathstar to solve world hunger. I’ll let the pictures tell the story.

So Orion’s newest grandparent’s and Uncle Caleb and Jaimee went in together on making Orion’s wildest dreams come true. After hauling the huge box up to our apartment we proceeded to open an absurd amount of little bags with legos in them. We now have four large boxes full of different sized legos waiting to take their place in that iconic symbol of destruction, the death star. I hope to update our progress regularly. Here is how far we have gotten so far.

We decided this week to take a trip to Florence, OR for Sabbath. We slept in a little too late for church. So we leisurely got out of bed and had a little church service of our own. A little reading from Orion’s Children Bible and the morning reading from the Psalter. The day was then ours. I wanted to go the beach.

On our last trip we discovered a beautiful secluded beach called Hobbit Beach. The trail to the beach explains the name. Its about a half mile journey through large trees and low lying shrubs that somehow seem as old as the trees that dwarf them. Their needles are small but they make the trail feel like a cave that travelers have had to continually dig out of the underbrush for hundreds of years. The trail descends to the beach that you can only hear faintly through the thick vegetation. You only know you are close when, still in the woods you are walking in soft sand. Then you are there and the ocean roars in the eternal rock concert of waves beating the shore into submission.

The wind was blowing, so the sand was constantly shifting and beating against our legs and getting into our stuff. After some skim boarding and running away from waves we decided to build a little wind shelter. The night before I haphazardly made a pizza before sundown which didn’t quite cook all the way. So we brought a large tupperware of not-quite-done pizza, some chips and some good Oregon brew.

The day was beautiful. Here is a bit of a song I wrote a while ago expressing the eternal metaphor of the ocean and the Creator.

I know some of you had hopes of me becoming a full fledged farmer, overalls and all. Well I live in an apartment now so this is what I can muster. A few carrots, some radishes, spinach, kale, some sort of broccoli that I am not really sure is broccoli, and garlic. Its pretty late in the year to be starting a garden so we’ll see what actually comes out of the ground and produces fruit. But it was fun to play in the dirt for a while. Orion and the neighbor kids helped me. Ilyana the Chilean girl next door was a big help and she let me try and speak Spanish to her.

I got one. I didn’t really think I would be able to get a job this soon but everything has worked out quite perfectly. A good friend back in B’ham set me up with her extended family in Eugene who own’s the Smith Family Bookstore. With a letter of introduction that apparently mentioned something about hiring me without asking any questions I got a phone call a couple weeks later. I have always wanted to work in a bookstore…or just to spend my day looking at books, helping people find books, learning about new books. But I am a little scared I am going to turn out to be like Jack Black in High Fidelity. Cursing and mocking those whose literary tastes don’t deserve the air it takes to tell them how angry i am that trees were cut down so we could print the keyboard vomit that is too many books today. I hope I am not like him because I am so thankful to have this job.

My new boss is a wonderful and flexible woman who has allowed me to basically pick any schedule i desire to fit my schedule with Orion. I couldn’t have asked for more. If I want to work full time I am merely to say so and it will likely happen. All this is beyond my expectations and yet very necessary since our bank account is quickly deteriorating. Praise be to God.

As I have said before my life has been a seemingly endless set of tasks and goals that are simply placed before me by our Creator. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking consciously about them. They simply just work out…and once I am in the middle of it I have moments where I am overwhelmed with thanksgiving for having a new adventure of which I am in the middle of that seems fun, challenging and life changing.